‘What to solve?’ – on Judita Cofman’s research on mathematics and its teaching

Abstract

In 2021 Mainz university (founded in 1477) celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of its re-opening after its closure in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. The mathematical department seized the opportunity to commemorate its first female professor of mathematics, Judita Cofman (1936–2001), by an online symposium in November 2021, which was organized by Dr Martina R Schneider. Judita Cofman was trained as a mathematics teacher and did a PhD in the field of finite geometries in Novi Sad (Yugoslavia) in 1963, after a research stay in Rome. She worked as a mathematician at the universities of Frankfurt amMain, London, Tübingen and Mainz. In 1978 she quit her job as professor at Mainz university to become a teacher of mathematics at Putney High School in London. In 1993 she was appointed professor of didactics of mathematics at the university of Erlangen-Nürnberg. After her retirement in 2001 she re-located to Debrecen (Hungary) and continued her work at the local university (Nikolić 2012, 2014). This short biography alone raises many questions. The symposium has made clear that Judita Cofman’s research and biography are not only of local historical interest. In addition to that, they touch upon several topics in the history of twentieth-century European mathematics that have been neglected or need further investigation. To mention only one: the exploration of Cofman’s biographical trajectory from Yugoslavia via Italy, the UK, and (West) Germany to Hungary promises new insights into the processes of circulation of mathematical and teaching practices and cultures between the East and the West during the Cold War and thereafter. The first section of the symposium was devoted to Cofman as a mathematician in Mainz. Andrea Blunck (Hamburg) gave a talk on women in mathematics in Germany. This made clear that Cofman’s appointment as professor in Mainz in 1973 fell in a